• by Dana Blankenhorn , March 9, 2003

It seems every AAAA conference needs a villain, or an imagined one. TiVo was the villain for this year’s event in New Orleans, and the industry went out of its way to convince itself it is not afraid.

A panel on sports marketing, moderated by ESPN anchor Rich Eisen, focused heavily on “brand integrated content” as an answer. It featured Tom Fox, senior vice president for sports and event marketing at Gatorade, which had a big win when athletes started giving Gatorade “baths” to winning coaches, which it followed by having logo-encrusted towels draped over athletes’ shoulders at games.

Gatorade’s program works because it’s “authentic,” said Ed Ehrhardt, president for customer marketing and sales with ESPN and ABC Sports, who was also on the panel, and it’s not new. In-show sponsors like Gillette Play of the Day have been around since the 1950s.

The danger comes when the promotion isn’t relevant to the audience, as with Fox’ promotions for its prime time shows during last year’s World Series, Ehrhardt claimed. But there was little denial of how powerful these promotions can be.

Eisen related it to his own job, which includes shooting ESPN commercials. “Three years ago we shot an argument about the next MVP in our cafeteria. We had no thought about what we were eating and drinking. And various people at the network ‘had a cow.’ That’s when people on the production side of things realized there’s a lot of product placement issues out there.

“It’s when the product gets inserted into the action that the fans see the line being crossed,” he added.

Participants on the media agency panel that followed Eisen’s group agreed that the TiVo problem isn’t new.

“The problem isn’t TiVo, it’s the remote control,” said John Mandel, co-CEO of MediaCom in New York. “Why is this a new problem?”

The biggest danger isn’t short-term thinking by consumers, but by brand managers, he added. “You don’t slap something together. You have to think it out and get a commitment. This has to be a strategic equity builder.”

It’s the long-term commitment to a placement, or to a sponsorship, that makes it most valuable, said Andrea Alstrup, corporate vice president for advertising with Johnson & Johnson, New Brunswick, NJ, whose client panel followed Mandel’s agency confab.

One example is the “family friendly” initiative J&J helped launch, aimed at creating programs sponsors like Alstrup will want to support. It’s now five years old, with 43 members, and looking at 40 program concepts for future airing.

So the answer to TiVo, and all the other “attention deficit” technologies consumers embrace, is to slow down. Strategy, not tactics, should be the name of the product placement game.